Wow...missed this one over the last several whirlwind days. Please read it. Both pages. A little geeky, but underscores the extraordinary mess we're now facing at the highest levels of government in regard to this entire e-voting nightmare/fiasco. Even the head of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) --- which is (theoretically) the governing federal body overseeing (or not) federal certification of voting machines --- is apparently clueless in regard to the real world threats inherent in these systems.

Why this story itself isn't front page and cover story material for NY Times, Washington Post, NEWSWEEK, Time et al, is way beyond my pay grade. (Though the eagle-eyed John Gideon caught it and made it so in his 'Daily Voting News' from a few days ago, natch. He wrote about this article at the time: "If you thought the Elections Assistance Commission was in existence to assist and protect the voters this article might influence you otherwise. Two of the commissioners can't even get their misinformation right.")

This story has been largely overlooked, while the recent landmark Brennan Center study has received a lot of much-deserved press. I was alerted to this article, in fact, by one of the main individuals responsible for that Brennan Center for Justice report on the security threats of e-voting.

After four years, more than $3 billion taxpayer dollars, and an alphabet soup of newly created bureaucracies, electronic voting isn't safe.

Key members of the Technical Guidance Development Committee (TGDC) that drafted federal guidelines for designing and testing electronic voting machines admit that significant flaws in the machines could be exploited by hackers to change the outcome of local or national elections.

A report by a grand jury in Boyd Co. Kentucky, which met for the last time Thursday, lists nine items for the next group to review, including that the vote count from the primary exceeded the reported number of total voters, the reason behind barring the media and candidates from vote counting and whether certain elected officials became involved in the decision to keep candidates and the media out of the clerk's office. The finger for this problem seems to be pointing at the county sheriff and Harp Enterprises who is a purveyor of Hart Intercivic....

In an email discussion yesterday among a group of Election Integrity advocates, in reply to the horrendous San Diego Union-Tribune coverage of the Busby/Bilbray issue, Yolo County, CA Registrar of Voters Freddie Oakley posted a crystal clear statement on the concerns of sending voting machines home with poll workers prior to elections.

"As an election official, I understand the practical issues involved here perfectly. I am strongly of the opinion that it is exactly this kind of practical issue that should give election officials serious reservations about deploying electronic voting machines," Oakley wrote.

"If, as a practical matter, [the electronic voting machines deployed prior to an election] can't be secured, then perhaps they ought not be used at all. Period. Until the impediment can be removed," her email statement read.

Her comment was in direct reply to a discussion about how voting machines, in the post-Hursti Hack age, might be deployed now that sending them home unsecured for "overnights" with poll workers is no longer a secure option. That hack, in Leon County, Florida in December 2005 of a Diebold optical scan voting system, has set off a chain reaction revealing massive vulnerabilities in these systems, forcing both federal and state authorities to issue extraordinary security requirements for the machines in just the last few months. Those requirements were subsequently all but ignored in the June 6th Busby/Bilbray U.S. House special election --- the first federal election in the nation to be administered since the additional mitigation requirements were put in place.

Oakley's responsible comments are in direct contradiction to the irresponsible statements by San Diego County Registrar Mikel Haas, given to the Union-Tribune, in which Haas dismisses concerns of election integrity advocates. Haas claims that proper procedures were followed (they were not) and that the practice of sending home voting machines with poll workers "has been followed without incident for about 40 years." Haas ignores, along with his other prevarications, that these eminently hackable electronic voting machines were not in use during all but the last few of those 40 years. The U-T didn't bother to quote, or apparently even attempt to contact, anyone who could reply directly to Haas' deceptive comments.

Registrar Oakley's entire statement --- a grand slam as far as I'm concerned --- should be read in full. It follows below...

It's still remarkable how many in the MSM regard bloggers as "unreliable"...even as they get story after story wrong and report unsubstantiated, unverifiable nonsense as fact.

I wrote early on in the Busby/Bilbray election results saga about AP (and all the rest) reporting that Brian Bilbray had won the election. They did so without a shred of evidence to prove that assertion.

A coalition of election watchdog organizations is calling on the San Diego County Registrar of Voters to conduct a full manual recount of the June 6 primary election because of alleged security breaches involving touch-screen voting machines.Specifically, the California Election Protection Network contends the county violated federal and state regulations requiring "secure custody" of voting machines by allowing poll workers to take them home before election day.

Okay...For a start...Who is calling for a recount, as Marelius writes? You can't recount something that you haven't counted in the first place and I know of no organization declaring "No Confidence" who has called for a "recount." Yet, the story uses the word "recount" again and again.

While it may be a subtle distinction, it's a very key one that I assure you both Karl Rove and Frank Luntz would understand quite clearly.

If the concept is too difficult to understand, however, the California Election Protection Network's press release announcing their eloquent "No Confidence" declaration --- referred to in the article --- not only never uses the word "recount", it also spells out clearly that they are not asking for a "recount". "Calling it a 'Free-Count' rather than a recount," the press release states, "the CEPN citizen watchdogs insist that this manual counting of the ballots be conducted without charge to the voting public."

If that was the only problem with the U-T article, we might have let it slide. But it's not. Not by a longshot. Marelius then goes on to "report" that a townhall meeting was held on Wednesday in San Diego. It was, of course. But apparently Marelius neither bothered to attend it, nor talk to anybody who actually did attend it.

He did, however, bother to report the point of view of SD County Registrar Mikel Haas (who also didn't attend). In fact, Marelius devoted a full five grafs to Haas' point of view. By my count, there are at least 5 different complete inaccuracies, misrepresentations and out-and-out misleading pieces of information passed on in those grafs...

On the subject of audits in Utah - The lieutenant governor's office will seek expert advice on the matter this summer and add the requirement administratively, said spokesman Joe Demma. "We could just randomly take 10 or 15 machines and audit the paper trail, but what we want are professional guidelines," Demma said. "We're going to look for professionals to set some guidelines for what would qualify as an accurate statistical model." How about Hawaii or New Mexico as examples of good audit laws?...

Brad appeared on this evening's edition of CNN Lou Dobbs Tonight. He explained some of the dangers of having wireless connections built-in to e-voting machines.

UPDATE FROM BRAD: Thanks for getting this up quickly, David! Was a quick piece tonight (made it back from a frantic trip back from San Diego just two minutes after my appointed time), but I'm pleased to be in the good company of Avi Rubin and Rep. Rush Holt in the Lou Dobbs report. I'm told they'll be using more of me tomorrow. We'll see. Ironically, I live about 3 blocks from the CNN building in Los Angeles and they've never called me in before...until I was several hours away in San Diego. No rest for the weary.

...But about to rush back to Los Angeles to get to the CNN building for an interview with the Lou Dobbs folks. If I can get there in time!

I should be on tonight's Lou Dobbs Tonight tonight at 6pm ET (3pm PT) and perhaps tomorrow night's show as well. Or so I'm told.

Had hoped to catch up a bit here about the Busby/Bilbray events last night and Tuesday, but it looks like that's going to have to wait again in order for me to race back up north to get to the interview on time...yeesh...

Will also be on Mike Malloy's national Air America program tonight as Guest Hosted by Laura Flanders. We were last on air with Laura when she came down to Crawford, TX to simulcast with us on The BRAD SHOW from Camp Casey last summer.

Apologies to those of you waiting for email responses and other interesting blog items here. Looks like I'll have to be off the grid again for a bunch of hours in a row...So Open Thread here as ya like!

UPDATE: Tonight's Dobbs clip, with a brief, yet starkly vital, cameo from yours truly, now posted here courtesy of the mighty David Edwards.

Just in from tonight's Busby/Bilbray Democracy Shindig in Oceanside. A great event with a lively turnout (including our old buddy Jim Lampley in da house.) As promised after last night's LA event, more as soon as I can catch my breath.

Until then, here's last night's Lou Dobbs, which I think was terrific. Be sure to watch it (or read it, transcript below the fold) until the end. Lou is gettin' angrier by the day...

I posted the results of the "Quick Poll" this morning before leaving Los Angeles. In case you missed it, the question was "Do you believe that e-voting machines should be disallowed until their integrity can be assured?" The results... YES: 97%, NO 3%.

Could America finally be coming to its senses?

Too exhausted to comment on this tonight with much detail, so please be my guest and "be the blog" for us here in comments. I will point out, however, that it's nice to see folks finally discussing the threat of Palm Pilots and other PDA's (personal digital assistants, as opposed to Progressive Democrats of America) and their wireless capacity posing a threat to these stupid systems as well. Kitty Pilgrim broaches the topic in this report from Tuesday which covered the release that day of the new NYU Brennan Center report on E-Voting security. We orginally discussed the alarming possibility of a voter with a PDA when we ran an exposé on the wireless Infrared (IrDA) port we photographed on one of the older paperless Diebold touch-screen systems.

"This report is based on speculation rather than an examination of the record. To date, voting systems have not been successfully attacked in a live election. The purported vulnerabilities presented in this study, while interesting in theory, would be extremely difficult to exploit." Bob Cohen, a spokesman for the Election Technology Council, a voting machine vendors' trade group speaking the party line (disinformation and obfuscation) regarding the Brennan Report. / I heartily recommend that you read the Internet news article that is the first on the list. If you thought the Elections Assistance Commission was in existence to assist and protect the voters this article might influence you otherwise. Two of the commissioners can't even get their misinformation right....

Must hit the road shortly to take the Democracy Train down to San Diego for tonight's Emergency Townhall on the Busby/Bilbray election results fiasco. If you're anywhere near San Diego or Oceanside please come out tonight! We had a great time last night in Los Angeles!

More on all of these as soon as I can catch my breath. The fine lower-cased blogger, skippy the bush kangaroo, was amongst those in attendance last night (as was Joseph Cannon of Cannonfire) and so I'll defer for the moment to skippy's coverage (since I don't have time for any of my own right). Skippy got a coupla small points slighly wrong, but I suspect he'll update since I let him know. As BRAD BLOG readers realize, unlike with AP and NY Times accuracy counts for bloggers.

Lou Dobbs report last night on the Brennan Center's year-in-the-making report on 120 threats to E-Voting Security was fan-damn-tastic. When I can catch my breath, I hope to get it, along with the video, posted in full. And more thoughts on that Brennan Center report. But for now, by way of teaser, Dobbs started it this way: "More evidence tonight that an increasing number of elections in this country can be outright stolen. And no one would ever know. It's incredible."

And, as of this hour, here are the results from his "Quick Poll" on this topic last night (you can still vote yourselves if you want)

Any questions? We're told he'll still be on the same beat tonight (6pm ET, 3pm PT --- you can send thank you notes/comments here to Dobbs for all of his very responsible coverage over the past three weeks and counting!)

Last, but most certainly not least, Washington Post covered the Brennan Center report themselves this morning. They highlighted the very message we've been trying to convey to Francine Busby, the voters in San Diego and across the nation over the last three weeks. The WaPo article begins this way...

A Single Person Could Swing an Election

To determine what it would take to hack a U.S. election, a team of cybersecurity experts turned to a fictional battleground state called Pennasota and a fictional gubernatorial race between Tom Jefferson and Johnny Adams. It's the year 2007, and the state uses electronic voting machines.

Jefferson was forecast to win the race by about 80,000 votes, or 2.3 percent of the vote. Adams's conspirators thought, "How easily can we manipulate the election results?"

The experts thought about all the ways to do it. And they concluded in a report issued yesterday that it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines, to change the outcome...

Today was the release of the Brennan Report which calls into question the security of e-voting machines. News services across the country have picked-up this story and it was big news on Lou Dobbs this evening. Lou Dobbs asked why none of the vendors have been on his program to defend their machines. Kitty Pilgrim said that Diebold has not returned calls, ES&S denied there are any problems and Sequoia said that the Brennan Report was not just about them so they didn't feel a need to respond. / Lou Dobb's on-line 'QuickPoll' question is "Do you believe that e-voting machines should be disallowed until their integrity can be assured?" 98% of the voters answered 'yes' as of the time of this report....

WASHINGTON — Most of the electronic voting machines widely adopted since the disputed 2000 presidential election "pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state and local elections," a report out Tuesday concludes.

There are more than 120 security threats to the three most commonly purchased electronic voting systems, the study by the Brennan Center for Justice says. For what it calls the most comprehensive review of its kind, the New York City-based non-partisan think tank convened a task force of election officials, computer scientists and security experts to study e-voting vulnerabilities.
...
Among the findings:

• Using corrupt software to switch votes from one candidate to another is the easiest way to attack all three systems. A would-be hacker would have to overcome many hurdles to do this, the report says, but none "is insurmountable."

• The most vulnerable voting machines use wireless components open to attack by "virtually any member of the public with some knowledge and a personal digital assistant." Only New York, Minnesota and California ban wireless components.

• Even electronic systems that use voter-verified paper records are subject to attack unless they are regularly audited.

• Most states have not implemented election procedures or countermeasures to detect software attacks.

Earlier this evening, I heard Mark Crispin Miller as the guest on Air America's Majority Report discussing the Busby/Bilbray election fiasco with whoever was guest hosting tonight (sorry I missed the name.) As well, I'm told that Lara Flanders covered the issue on Air America as well tonight while guest hosting for Mike Malloy (I believe both Mimi Kennedy and Jeeni Criscenzo were her guests.)

But the largest media outlet to cover the story that we originally broke back on June 7th --- and who still failed to invite me as a guest...am I hard to reach? --- was Lou Dobbs on CNN.

Tonight, Dobbs covered the threat to democracy posed by the Voting Machine Sleepovers that we've been reporting on here since the Busby/Bilbray election was run on highly-hackable Diebold voting machines which were sent home overnight with poll workers for days and weeks prior to the election in contravention of both state and federal rules and laws.

One of our sources, San Diego Poll Worker Patti Newton, who we had helped CNN's producers get in touch with, is interviewed in tonight's report. Newton shows, on camera, the location of the "secure storage" she provided (her garage, near the paints) for the voting machines given to her for use in the "bellweather" Busby/Bilbray U.S. House Special Election a full week prior to the Election Day on June 6th. We originally posted some of Patti's story in our report back on June 8th.

Tonight Dobbs and reporter Kitty Pilgrim discussed "the threat to American democracy from within," the lack of security for e-voting machines and described them as "incredibly vulnerable to fraud, tampering, hacking and theft."

Most states rely on national certification/qualification of voting systems. They tend to tout the fact that voting systems have been inspected and tested by some Independent Test Authority, though they ignore the fact that the tests are bought and paid for by the vendors. Then they point with steadfastness to the National Association of State Elections Directors (NASED) who reviews the ITA findings and gives a voting system its final 'stamp of approval'. Now we learn that the people applying that 'stamp of approval' are not even qualified to put ink on the stamp, let alone review the paperwork and give their approval. Imagine how the states will feel about this information. On the other hand, don't waste your time because the truth is inconvenient so they will just ignore it....

My reporting here, and the concerns expressed about the Busby/Bilbray election results as announced, have little or nothing to do with Francine Busby or Brian Bilbray or even, in particular, the June 6th U.S. House special run-off election in California's 50th congressional district.

It has only a tiny bit more to do with San Diego. And only slightly more than that to do with California.

It has everything, however, to do with democracy. Across the entire country. As opposed to any one race in any one area.

If I've not been clear on that until now, please allow me to set the record straight.

The concerns I've reported --- and will continue to report --- over the blatant disregard for the rule of law and clear illegalities endorsed and encouraged by the SD County Registrar of Voters, Mikel Haas, and apparently approved at this point by California's Secretary of State Bruce McPherson, have everything to do with the future viability of democracy in this country in general, and a perhaps naive hope that there's a chance in hell that taking action now will help to salvage a shred of legitimacy for this November's election.

That can only happen if action is taken now, however, directly in regard to the Busby/Bilbray election results as announced.

As far as I can see it, what happens in regard to Busby/Bilbray will be America's last, best, and only hope of affecting any real election reform prior to the November 7th general election. That's why, for me, this has become "Line in the Sand" time.

Never, in the two-and-a-half year history of The BRAD BLOG have I set aside almost everything else in order to cover and raise attention to a single story --- to the exclusion of almost every other story --- for such a long period of time as I have done since the original coverage of this matter the day after the June 6th election.

Since then, I've stated many times in both written and spoken words that I don't actually give a damn who won the Busby/Bilbray race and that I didn't even much bother to follow any of it prior to Election Day. I've got no dog in the hunt and only care that the person who actually received the most votes is the one that was declared the winner. At this point, there is absolutely no way of knowing who actually won.

The fact of the matter is that just two or three months after both the federal certification oversight body (NASED) and California's own Secretary of State issued emergency "security mitigation requirements" in light of newly discovered and massive vulnerabilities in Diebold's voting systems, those security requirements were entirely tossed out the window when all of the machines were sent home with poll workers for overnights in the days and weeks prior to the election. In doing so, the machines themselves were effectively rendered illegal and uncertified for use in any California election, and at the federal level as well.

Unless something is done, the same thing is about to happen in elections across this entire country.

(NOTE: Lou Dobbs will be covering this issue on CNN tonight I am told. Including interviews with some of the poll worker sources we gave them after originally reported on them here at BRAD BLOG.)

I'd have hoped that more media, candidates, individuals and even Election Reform organizations would have come to understand the national significance of what all the sturm and drang here has actually been about. If they haven't, that's likely my failing. So I'll try again to make both myself and the stakes here crystal clear...

What happens here and now --- in regard to this race and its results as announced --- will send a signal to elections administrators across the country. The signal will be one of two...